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About Orphan and Retired (Deprecated) Packages

When Fedora maintainers do not want or are not able to maintain a package any
longer, they can orphan or retire the
package. When they think that the package is still useful for Fedora, they
should orphan it. Then other maintainers that are interested in maintaining it,
can take ownership of this package. In case the package is no longer useful for
Fedora, e.g. because it was renamed, upstream does not exist anymore, then it
should be retired.

Orphaned packages remain in the distribution and are the responsibility of the collective packaging community to maintain.

Retired packages are removed from the release. (They remain in prior releases.)

Retiring packagesOrphan packages will re retired if they remain orphaned. This is normally done shortly before branching for a new release.

When to orphan and retire your packagesWe encourage maintainers considering orphaning their packages to do it as early in the development cycle as possible. Shortly after the prior release is branched is a good time.

Claiming Ownership of an Orphaned Package Procedure

Announce on devel which packages you would like to become the owner of.

Log into the Package Database and select the package you want to become the owner of.

Press the "Take Ownership" button for each active branch that you want to maintain.

Take over and join (or re-assign to you) open bug reports in bugzilla where package owner's attention is needed.

Claiming Ownership of a Retired Package

If you really want to maintain a retired package, you need to be aware that
if upstream is dead, fixing release critical bugs, etc becomes your
responsibility. This is to ensure the high quality and standards of packaging
remain for Fedora package collection. There may be additional issues with
retired packages. If possible, consult with the former maintainer for more information.
The process is a bit different from unorphaning a package

Announce on devel which packages you would like to become the owner of.

Retired Fedora packages (master/devel/rawhide branch retired) require a re-review if they are retired for more than two weeks or if there is no previous review of the package. Submit a review request (a new bugzilla ticket) and have the package approved by a reviewer as if it were new to Fedora. See the package review process for more information. To unretire a EPEL branch if the package is still in Fedora, no re-review is required.

Open a package SCM admin request after the rereview, in the new rereview ticket (or existing one if the rereview is not required per the previous clause) to assign ownership to you.

When the SCM admin assigns the package to you it should unretire the package as well. If the package status still says "Deprecated" or "Orphaned" instead of "Approved", you could have encountered a bug. Please open a ticket on https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ and assign it to "toshio" or contact toshio via irc: abadger1999, or one of the mailing lists (infrastructure list or devel list)